


Keep One Light On, I'll Always Find My Way

by ifimightchime



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Chocolatebox Treat, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Theoretical ideas how Wanda Maximoff's powers might work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-10-28 19:00:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17792945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifimightchime/pseuds/ifimightchime
Summary: It’s a moment of weakness, the first time Wanda tries to bring Pietro back.





	Keep One Light On, I'll Always Find My Way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [copacet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/copacet/gifts).



It’s a moment of weakness, the first time Wanda tries to bring him back.

She knows that it probably won’t work even as she moves, channels her rage and her grief and her loneliness into one sharp motion, lashing out with the miracle that was forced upon her and demanding it give her the one things she wants, needs, more than anything. She reaches into whatever there is after life that’s taken Pietro away and she _pulls_ , and when she blinks, he’s standing there before her.

A sob rips itself out of her throat, and there isn’t time for anything else to register before Wanda steps forwards, her arms outstretched to him.

Pietro doesn’t move.

He doesn’t move towards her. He doesn’t move at _all_ , something that would always be unlikely for her fidgety brother, and all the more so after the scientists got ahold of them. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t do anything -- doesn’t feel right in her head, she realizes abruptly, her forward motion stuttering to a stop. The presence of him in her mind is a shape she learned quickly, the only thing that brought her anything like comfort while they were still captives, and there is no shape here. There’s only a blank, like a mannequin or a statue.

“Pietro?” she tries, her voice wavering, and when he doesn’t speak, she’s certain he’s nothing but a figment. A shadow her grieving mind has pulled forth to try and comfort her.

But a shadow with Pietro’s face is all she can hope to have anymore, so she throws herself forward despite it. 

He’s solid against her, but strange, made of edges where there shouldn’t be any, somehow unsubstantial despite the fact that she can touch him. Red light crackles where her arms press against him, and though his arms come up around her, it feels nothing like Pietro comforting her. It feels like nothing.

She grabs the energy crackling around him and tears, shutting her eyes so she doesn’t have to watch him disappear, and vows that she won’t try it again. She has her answer, and that’s enough.

She already knows she isn’t strong enough to keep that promise.

*

The second try, and the third, both go much the way of the first. Her loneliness takes the better of her, and the figment stands before her, looking too much like Pietro for feeling nothing at all like him.

The fourth time, she forces herself to keep her distance, watching him in silence to see if he ever breaks it. She sits there for ages, the figment standing and, eventually, sitting across a room from her.

“Well?” he finally says, five hours into the quiet standoff. “What now?” It’s Pietro’s voice, and yet, there’s something inexplicably wrong about it, something that makes her skin crawl.

She releases that one back to nothingness as well, and sits there in the dark until morning.

*

The next time, she stands there for a long time before she moves, focusing on what she wants to happen. It’s a theory the team has been testing with her, playing with in practice -- not a useful one for any kind of fight, but it might give her a better idea how her abilities work if it helps, so they’ve encouraged the practice.

This, she knows, is not what they meant by it; but her grief outweighs her guilt.

She stands there still, ignoring the crackle of power wanting to come to the forefront, tingling in her fingers. She thinks of her brother, alive again in front of her. She thinks of being whole again. She thinks of his arms around her and the shape of his mind, and when she’s built the idea of him so strongly she can almost imagine that he’s there after all, she lets herself move, and pull.

It still isn’t him. She knows it, from the angle of his body, from the blankness he makes in her mind. 

It isn’t him, but when she wraps her arms around him, it’s something almost human, warm and solid in her grip, and she shuts her eyes tight and squeezes him close and tells herself this will be enough. She wanted one last moment, and this is the closest she will ever get.

“I miss you,” she says, quietly, and takes a deep breath, steeling herself. “Goodbye, Pietro.”

This time, she watches as he disappears, bursting into red light and then nothing, and she tells herself she is done.

*

The next time is the only time she cries, sitting next to him, just out of reach. The only thing that stops her from asking him to talk to her, to touch her, is knowing how wrong it will be if he does.

*

In the end, the solution is so simple, Wanda wonders why it took so long to see it.

She cannot give life to the dead. She tells herself that, again and again, when the urge to try once more strikes; she cannot give life where there is none, and she will not bring back another shade of Pietro to taunt her. It doesn’t help her heal. It only hurts, to look at them and know there’s nothing of her brother there in his own face.

She tries to think of him in life instead, to ignore the tingling in her fingers that aches to pull at something she’ll never reach and remember him as he was instead. To think of good moments, scarce as they seemed so much of the time. She thinks of the way he took care of her, the way he listened and protected. She can imagine him chiding her for her choice to join the team, worry under his teasing; she’s sure he’d be besides her, as he always was, when he could be. In another world, where he’d been there to join with her, she wonders what he’d have thought of the others, what he’d have contributed to--

The words slam into her like they’re throwing open a door she hadn’t realized was there. _In another world_ , and she wonders if there could be such a thing. If there could be a world where he was, could she make it that way here? Could she be there, instead?

The power crackling up her spine makes her think, maybe, she could.

She’s been thinking of him as dead all this time, thinking of it as him coming back, but now she tries to think of him as he was, as he could be. She tries with all her heart to ignore the feeling of missing him, to feel the certainty of his presence in her bones instead.

She can’t twist _him_ , can’t make him stop being dead, but when she tries to twist the world into one where he never was gone instead, she pulls and she can feel _change_.

It hurts. It hurts like being reshaped, like when the power was first burned into her, but she clenches her teeth and doesn’t let go of the thought that Pietro is there, Pietro has never been anywhere else, Pietro has always been with her, and the power that courses through her twists around her and rips the world apart.

For a moment, all she sees is red.

Not much changes, when it settles. The room is different in small ways, ways that she can’t keep in her head, her vision blurry from the pain, her head ringing. There is no shadow of her brother in front of her.

Instead, there’s a presence, a shape in her mind she could never forget, and the doorknob begins to turn and Wanda holds her breath.

She knows it’s Pietro the moment he steps through. There’s animation to him, solidity that her figments lacked, and he moves, he smiles, he’s real, he’s _real_.

“Are you,” Pietro begins to say, and Wanda flings herself at him, wrapping her arms around him and letting out a small, choked sob when no red light crackles between them, when he’s human and solid and warm against her.

“You’re here,” she says, her voice choked, and Pietro nudges the door shut behind him before wrapping his arms around her, stroking her hair lightly.

“You saw me an hour ago,” he says, concern under the confusion in his voice, and she hides her tears in his shirt.

There will be questions to answer soon, a how to try and explain, a where and when to learn, but Wanda feels like she has finally come home.


End file.
